Ghosts, phantom pains, deceased people, ancestors, destroyed buildings, gods, silences... absence is an unusual, yet fascinating theme. Indeed, quite paradoxically, absence has a materiality and has effects on the spaces people inhabit and their daily practices and experiences. In this talk I consider the relational ontology of absence, conceiving absence not as a thing in itself but as something that exists through relations that give absence matter. Absence, in this view, is something performed, textured and materialized through relations and processes, and via objects. We therefore need to trace absence. Two such traces will be discussed in more detail: death and the absence of life, and silence and the absence of sound.

Recasting Mary Douglas’ (1984) famous definition of dirt as ‘matter out of
place’, I will argue that, while absence is matter out of place, it is still placed through matter. Although, strictly speaking, absence is a thing without matter, absence is ordered, remembered, evoked and made discussable and sufferable through materialities. And even though absence escapes - and can only ever be partially and temporarily contained in - certain places, it is within these places and through leaving various kinds of traces that absence comes to matter.